"What I don't understand," said Sandy, "is why nothing's labelled. Nothing's marked. Whoever built it must have known how to write, in some fashion. A civilized race has to have written records to stay civilized! But I haven't seen a symbol or a pointer or even a color used to give information." She got out the papers on which she would code the reports as Burke and Holmes turned them over for transmission. She began to write out, carefully, the elaborate key to the coding. Almost reluctantly, Pam prepared to do the same with Holmes' narrative of what he'd seen. But if enthusiasm was tempered in the ship, there was no such reserve in the United States. Burke's voice had cut into one of the space broadcasts which arrived every seventy-nine minutes. There had been the usual cryptic, plaintive piping noises, repeating for the thousandth time their meaningless message. Then a human voice said almost inaudibly, "_... 'll we do now, Joe?_" It was heard over an entire hemisphere, where satellite-tracking stations and radar telescopes listened to and recorded every broadcast from space. It was a stupendous happening. Then Burke's voice came through the flutings. "_This must be the transmitter. The sound-record for the broadcasts must be in here, somehow. It's quite possible that this plate is a sort of microphone...._" A few seconds later he was heard to say, "_The devil!_" And later still he addressed himself directly to his listeners on Earth. He'd spoken the words eighteen and a fraction minutes before they arrived, though they traveled at the speed of light. Broadcast and ecstatically reported in the United States, they touched off a popular reaction as widespread as that triggered by the beginning of the signals themselves. Broadcasters abandoned all other subject matter. Announcers with lovely diction stated the facts and then expanded them into gibbering nonsense. Man had reached M-387. Man had spoken to Earth across two hundred seventy million miles of emptiness. Man had taken possession of a fortress in space. Man now had an outpost, a stepping-stone toward the stars. Man had achieved.... Man had risen.... Man now took the first step toward his manifest destiny, which was to occupy and possess all the thousands of thousands of planets all the way to the galaxy's rim.